“JFK Secretly Attends Jackie Auction,” “Jealous Husband Returns
in Form of Parrot,” “Doomsday Meteor is Coming,” “Titanic Victim Speaks
Through Waterbed.” Do any of these tabloid headlines sound like subject matter
for great literature? To Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler, they
do.

Taking his cue from works such as Oedipus the King and
Hamlet, Butler works under the premise that if it is to be meaningful,
literature has to connect in some way with mass culture.

“I think you can look at the enduring works of great
literature and see them in a certain way,” Butler said in an interview during
his book-tour stop in Minneapolis. “Take this for instance: ‘King Inadvertently
Marries Own Mother, Plucks Out Eyes,’ or ‘Prince Sees Ghost of Dead Father, Who Fingers Own Murderer.’ I haven’t done this systematically yet, but I suspect
that every great work of enduring literature in the world can be expressed as a
really good tabloid headline.”

Butler’s new collection of stories, Tabloid Dreams,
takes twelve such tabloid headlines and explores them in ways that the National
Enquirer never imagined. Stories such as “Help Me Find My Spaceman Lover”
and “Nine-Year-Old is World’s Youngest Hit Man” are no longer simply third-hand
reports of some Albanian scientist’s research. Like the stories in Butler’s
last collection, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, they’re real
literature inhabited by real characters.

“The themes that were most urgent from A Good Scent from
a Strange Mountain,” Butler says, “one could describe as cultural exile,
loss, aspiration, the search for self and identity, and those themes were still
kicking around in me after I’d finished the book. And one late night a the
24-hour Kroger’s in Lake Charles, near where I live, those themes leaped out
and attached themselves while I was standing in line, shifting a cold bottle of
milk from hand to hand—they leaped out and attached themselves to one of the
headlines down there on that bottom rack. I think that night it was probably
‘Boy Born with Tattoo of Elvis.’ And I suddenly realized that the tabs had consistently
been getting the headlines right, but they’d been getting the stories wrong.
So this book sets the record straight on a dozen important issue of our time.”

In writing these stories, Butler reclaims some of our
culture’s greatest myths. He treats Elvis, the Titanic, and
extraterrestrials with the respect they deserve, rescuing them from the
banality to which constant exposure has subjected them. Citing the upcoming
Broadway musical about the Titanic as a prime example of how amazing
things can become little more than a joke, Butler returns the potency to his
subjects. People love Elvis, Marilyn, and JFK for a reason, and Butler looks
past their superficial treatment in the tabloids to see why these mythical
figures elicit such powerful responses in the public.

“I think that this particular penchant in our society, our
culture,” Butler says, “is very deeply related to mythology, folklore, urban
belief tales, which we know to take seriously. Human beings need to feel as if
the intensities of their mundane daily lives are connected to something larger,
and we do this by projecting our daily concerns into much larger dramas—peopled
by much larger figures or wildly extended circumstances. I think that’s the
impulse that creates myths, and it’s an impulse that creates an interest in
these kinds of stories.”

The best stories in this collection are the ones that
dissect awesome events to find, at their heart, an intense human connection.
The story “Doomsday Meteor is Coming” and the sister stories “Titanic Victim
Speaks Through Waterbed” and “Titanic Survivors Found in Bermuda
Triangle” portray the intense need for connection that impending doom
necessitates.

In the meteor story, two twentysomethings, Linus and
Janice, spend the day at a Gen-X “Zima Garden,” where Linus overhears a report
about the doomsday meteor. While Linus goes through astonishing levels of
existential dread, the oblivious Janice keeps pestering him to get his nipple
pierced as a symbol of their commitment. Although her request at first sounds
pathetically small in comparison to the weight of the meteor, ultimately Linus
decides to go through with it.

“The implication of this story,” Butler says, “is that the
imminent end of the world does not drive him to religion or to notions of a
higher being. In a way he accepts the randomness, as it were—and recognizes
that all he can hold on to is his girlfriend, is this other person here, who is
oblivious and remains oblivious, but for whom he makes a serious gesture of
connection, to the point of being prepared to mutilate his body. And so the
flesh that is so vulnerable to this imminent death he then willingly violates.”

The Titanic pieces may be even better. Probably the
collection’s best-written stories, they portray both the immensity of the 1912
tragedy and its effects on two very human characters. But unlike in “Doomsday
Meteor is Coming,” the characters in these stories never quite get it.

Butler calls the Titanic “the symbol of man’s
technological hubris at the beginning of this century. But ultimately what is
most important and what lingers and what literally haunts this disembodied
spirit in the first story and the woman in the last has nothing to do with all
those grandiose macro things, but indeed has to do with a moment of connection—that
Linus has sense enough to seize, but these two people do not, to their
everlasting regret.”

For their inability to connect, the man is forever doomed
to haunt waterbeds, cups of tea, and toilets, while the woman is doomed to live
in an unknown time, with no chance at ever reclaiming her lost connection.

Despite the collection’s frequent zaniness, Tabloid
Dream is a very serious look at the way Americans live. Butler does have a
lot of fun with them, but he doesn’t make fun of these absurd dramas. He sees
them as a way into our collective psyche, and if he’s laughing, he’s laughing
with us.

“The jokes in this book all come from inside the
characters,” Butler says. “There are no one-liners in these stories. It’s a
very funny book, but it’s also as serious a book as I’ve ever written. … A lot
of what we call postmodern novel writers have drawn on the popular culture, but
they have done it, far too often, from the position of aloofness, scorn—or
satire, parody. But I think artists need to get inside the popular culture, and
that’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to use these headlines as ways into
the enduring themes that artists have always been concerned with.”

With HBO turning the book into a series, Butler is truly
interacting with the popular culture, giving as much back to it as he has taken
from it. This is the function of a sincere mythmaker, and Butler succeeds,
although in different ways than the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen,
in making the seemingly outlandish cultural phenomena come alive in a very real
and useful way. But like those writers, Butler looks to be in this for the long
haul.

“I’ve got so many other headlines that are exciting me
still,” Butler says. “I have a hunch I’m gonna write another book of these.
I’ll probably call it More Tabloid Dreams Found on Mars.”